His plan for the supreme office consisted in eschewing any interest in it if Taft would promise whole-hearted support for NATO. This was a brilliant plan, because he didn’t tell Taft about it, and while Taft wished him well, he professed to be uncertain if he favored dispatching four or six American divisions to Europe. Had Eisenhower told him that with Taft’s full support, i.e., for six divisions, he, Eisenhower, would permanently withdraw from politics, Taft, though even more guileless and less opportunistic than Truman, would almost certainly have provided that support to assure himself the Republican nomination that he had twice before sought unsuccessfully. In any case, the senator’s preliminary support for the dispatch of four divisions or six to Europe was a completely implausible reason for making such a career decision, and was only revealed after Taft was dead and Eisenhower had won the prize in question. The whole story is piffle.
Eisenhower, as in his career as a whole, was midway between his mentors, MacArthur and Marshall; he wanted political office almost as ardently as did MacArthur, but unlike his old chief, knew how to seem disinterested, and looked almost as disinterested as Marshall really was, but was as politically ambitious as MacArthur, if much more subtle. He was an amiable and fine-looking man, but lacked MacArthur’s great oratorical talents (although he was a better writer).
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In fairness, if Dewey had won in 1948, as he should have, given his advantages, and had won a second term, it is doubtful that Eisenhower would have leapt into political life at the age of 66 in 1956. He wanted the presidency, but on his own timetable.
As the Republican nomination in 1952 approached, it became clear that it would be a close race for delegates between Taft as the candidate of the party regulars, and Eisenhower as the public favorite and choice of the lean and hungry Republicans most tired of Democratic incumbency. In the southern states, which always voted Democratic, the Republicans didn’t hold primaries and party locals chose the delegates, who naturally had the same votes at a convention as the delegates from other states that the Republicans had a real chance to win in a general election. The party elders in southern states favored Taft, but there were competing slates of Eisenhower supporters, and it would all come down to which group of delegates the convention would seat. The three-term governor of California and 1948 vice presidential candidate, Earl Warren, hoped for an even split between Taft and Eisenhower and his own victory as a compromise candidate. To this end, he stood as a favorite son and required that all California delegates be pledged to him.
Eisenhower, despite all his coy protestations, was in intense discussion with the Dewey forces that backed him. The only player who played a more adept game of political maneuver than Eisenhower was the 39-year-old junior senator from California, Richard M. Nixon. He pledged personal, private, verbal loyalty to his leader in the Senate, Taft; signed a loyalty pledge to Warren to assure his membership in the California delegation (which would not be his ex-officio as a U.S. senator from California); but privately arranged with Dewey that if he could deliver California’s votes to seat the Eisenhower delegates at the convention from the contested southern states, Dewey would press his nomination for vice president on Eisenhower. Nixon was already a well-known and active campaigner around the country, having been the nominee of both the Republicans and the Democrats in his congressional district in 1948 and after the conviction of Alger Hiss in the perjury proceedings that Nixon’s questions had generated and his much publicized victory over Helen Gahagan Douglas in 1950 for the Senate.
Truman wrote Eisenhower in December 1951 asking his political intentions and the general wrote back from Paris on New Year’s Day, 1952, in longhand, that “You know, far better than I, that the possibility that I will ever be drawn into political activity is so remote as to be negligible.”
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Five days later, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge publicly established the Eisenhower-for-President campaign, and the day after that, Eisenhower said he would accept the nomination if chosen. He won the New Hampshire primary a few weeks later, and shortly after that his supporters held a rally of 30,000 people for him in Madison Square Garden. Dewey smoked him out in early April with a message that if he didn’t get off the fence and stop pretending he was George Washington waiting for a draft (not that Dewey used that phrase), MacArthur would be nominated—a complete fiction, but a nightmare for Eisenhower (because of the cordial but intense rivalry that had developed between them) that propelled him back from Paris.
Nixon boarded Warren’s convention train bound from Sacramento to Chicago at Denver on July 3, and went through the train urging every delegate to move to Eisenhower on the second ballot. Taft, with five contested state delegations supporting him, was about 100 delegates ahead with a little over 100 pledged to Warren, but those were really honeycombed by Nixon. There were about 150 undecided. At the California caucus meeting on July 6, Nixon seized the microphone unannounced after the other California senator, William Knowland, had called for a divided California vote on the seating of Taft and Eisenhower delegates, to try to promote a stand-off between them. Nixon said this would be sleazy and self-defeating, and that despite his great respect for Taft, he believed the Republicans had to do the right thing: obey the people’s will. He added, incidentally, that only Eisenhower could win and that he was not interested in going down as a Republican for the sixth straight time.
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This essentially stampeded Warren’s delegates from under him, and led to Eisenhower winning the contested delegates and the convention, even though Taft, in a final throw, let it be known that if nominated, he would select MacArthur for vice president. Had Nixon not been so effective an infiltrator, Taft would have won the nomination, MacArthur might well have put him across in the election, and, as Taft died in August 1953, MacArthur could have been president after all, at the ripe age of 73. (He lived until 1964, in excellent health until about 1961.) MacArthur was the convention keynote speaker, but gave an uncharacteristically flaccid speech.
The young Cassius, Nixon, was playing a subtle high-stakes game among men who were already world-historic figures. Eisenhower was nominated, Dewey championed Nixon, who was invited aboard by Eisenhower, and they ran on a platform that condemned Truman’s handling of Korea and China without exactly endorsing MacArthur, advocated reduced spending, debt, and taxes, promised retention of the Taft-Hartley right-to-work and open shop law, and implied some sympathy for the McCarthyite fiction about a Democratic sell-out to Stalin, though neither candidate touched that hot iron and both stayed well clear of McCarthy himself. (Eisenhower knew what bunk the Yalta Myth was, as he showed when he reminded the Russians of their failure to honor their Yalta obligations throughout his dealings with them as president.)
While Eisenhower was not really drafted, Adlai E. Stevenson, the governor of Illinois and Roosevelt’s assistant secretary of the navy, who had not, in fact, sought the nomination, was drafted by the Democrats. An eloquent, liberal intellectual and grandson of Cleveland’s second vice president, he conducted a stylish and articulate campaign. The Democrats integrally supported the Roosevelt-Truman record, opposed Taft-Hartley, and retained the championship of civil rights for African Americans from Truman and Humphrey four years before, but reverted to the previous practice of nominating a segregationist southerner, Senator John J. Sparkman of Alabama, for vice president. Nixon had to endure a tense controversy over a so-called slush fund that was not, in fact, improper, and was less controversial than the personal financial arrangements of both Eisenhower and Stevenson. Eisenhower was not overly supportive, but Nixon saved his nomination with a dramatic, if rather mawkish, speech in which he referred to the gift of a dog, Checkers, to his young daughters.
Eisenhower disappointed many by speaking in Wisconsin and excising from his text, after it had been distributed to the press, a planned defense of General Marshall in the home state of his chief accuser, McCarthy. Stevenson spoke shortly after at the University of Wisconsin and said: “Disturbing things have taken place in our land. The pillorying of the innocent has caused the wise to stammer and the timid to retreat.... The voice of the accuser stills every other voice in the land.... If General Eisenhower would publicly embrace those who slandered General Marshall, there is certainly no reason to believe that he would restrain those who would slander me.”
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It was an uncharacteristic act of outright cowardice by Eisenhower.
On October 24, Eisenhower portentously announced: “I shall go to Korea” (with no hint of what he would do when he got there). On election day, Eisenhower and Nixon won 33.9 million votes to 27.3 million votes for Stevenson and Sparkman, 442 electoral votes to 82, 55.5 percent to 44 percent. The Republicans narrowly won control of both houses of the Congress, although Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon quit the Republicans over Eisenhower’s deference to McCarthy and desertion of Marshall. Eminent Republican international lawyer John Foster Dulles, legal counsel of the American delegation at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, briefly Hitler’s lawyer in the U.S. in 1933, partial author of the Japan Peace Treaty, grandson of Benjamin Harrison’s second secretary of state, John W. Foster, and nephew of Wilson’s, Robert Lansing, would be the new secretary of state. (It was a remarkable family. Dulles’s brother, Allen, was head of the Central Intelligence Agency, 1953–1961, and his son, Avery, a religious convert, was an eminent theologian and ultimately a cardinal.)
Harry S. Truman left office with a minority of Americans approving his performance, but was soon and is now durably regarded as a capable president and a man of unpretentious courage and integrity and wisdom. His command decisions on the atomic bomb, Berlin, NATO, the Marshall Plan, and Korea were all correct, important, and successful. In his homespun forthrightness and simplicity, he was in all respects the flip side of his elegant and devious predecessor. Truman was the average man, who in his capabilities was far from average, thrust up from the people; Roosevelt was the invincible aristocrat, ruling indefinitely and at his own pleasure by a combination of divine right, popular will, and natural aptitude, calling everyone by their first names, as Acheson pointed out, with the suave assurance of a Bourbon king, making no distinction between “the secretary of state and a stable boy.”
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It had been impossible, as Ernest Hemingway remarked, to reply to Roosevelt because of his overwhelming personality and almost absolute power. They had both been fine presidents and it had been a time of immense accomplishment, as America advanced from the depths of the Great Depression to overwhelming power, influence, and responsibility.
2. PRESIDENT DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER
The president-elect made a very short visit to South Korea, and soon made it known to Chinese Premier Chou En-lai, through the Indian government, that if the long-snarled cease-fire talks did not move, the use of atomic weapons would commend itself to him. On July 27, 1953, a Korean armistice was signed at Pan Mun Jon, and general warfare along the 38th parallel has been avoided since, though there have been many relatively local violations. This raises the question of why Truman did not try the same tactic. The Korean War cost 53,000 dead, missing, or captured American servicemen, and 93,000 were wounded, 170,000 South Korean military personnel were killed and 450,000 were wounded, while 750,000 South Korean civilians were killed and 230,000 were injured. About 300,000 North Korean military personnel were killed and 300,000 wounded, and 1.55 million civilians were killed or injured; the Chinese suffered approximately 400,000 military deaths and 500,000 injuries. After the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars and the World Wars, it produced the greatest number of deaths of any conflict since the Thirty Years’ War in the seventeenth century.
The subsequent spectacular growth of the South Korean economy to a sophisticated trillion-dollar model of modern industry in a well-functioning democracy, and more than 15 times the level of prosperity of the North, which wallows yet in desperate poverty, famine, and tyranny, reinforced the success of the Truman administration’s initial objective to preserve the South from aggression. Eisenhower, despite the inflamed rhetoric of much of the Republican Party, effectively continued Truman’s policy and had much more in common with his policy and personality than with MacArthur’s, and took a number of occasions to emphasize his extremely high regard for George C. Marshall (to whom he owed his astounding rise from obscurity to world-historic command positions). Eisenhower would suavely anneal the national schism, and apply his diplomatic skills to conserve almost all the achievements of the Roosevelt-Truman years while leading the Republicans back to the mainstream of American political life after decades of almost flat-earth marginalization where Roosevelt’s political cunning and chicanery and policy genius had confined them.
Joseph Stalin died on March 5, 1953, after a harsh and violent dictatorship of 29 years, and a divided regime succeeded him, leading to a rending but almost bloodless factional struggle for power. (Stalin’s chief assistant Poskrebyshev and the police minister, Lavrenti Beria, were executed, but other members of losing factions were retired; Molotov eventually became director of a hydroelectric power dam in Siberia, after 30 years near the summit of Soviet life.) After a couple of years, Nikita S. Khrushchev emerged as the party secretary general, the most important position in the USSR, and was a less sinister figure than Lenin or Stalin, his only predecessors.